Monday, August 9, 2010

The Revenge of Mondays

I think I've said I don't like Mondays once too often. Mondays are getting their own back.

Today was...very Monday. It started out with my worrying: Sookie had been feeling sick yesterday and hadn't been acting at all like herself. She was off her food, very lethargic and generally not at all Sookie-Sue like. I thought she'd be ok this morning but she was still very mopey and wouldn't eat so I felt a little worried when I went off to work.

Of course, then I decided to do some internet research to make sure she was ok. I knew one of the Dog Whisperer's beasts had Parvo not too long ago. Parvo is a very nasty dog infection that's highly contagious and, apparently, unless you bleach everything the dog comes into contact with, it's very hard to kill.

So, I did some reading and discovered that Sookie's symptoms resembled those of the early stages of Parvo. I panicked. I made an appointment at the vet for the end of the day and proceeded to worry until I went home for lunch.

At lunch time, Sookie seemed somewhat normal. She ate a little, played a little and seemed mostly back to herself. Feeling like a very overprotective pet parent, I decided to cancel the vet appointment and just watch her to see how she acted.

I went back to work feeling better. Well, except for the fact that our President had scheduled yet another one of his infamous "impromptu staff meetings."

These, as I've mentioned before, are usually scheduled for the entire staff with less than 24 hours notice. This one starts at 8:30 a.m. tomorrow. In our company, these 'invitations' to the meetings are greeted with much dread and paranoia. I've mentioned this. It stems from the fact that these meetings a) Never, ever provide good news, b) follow several closed-door conversations between my boss- the V.P of the company and his boss- the president of the company and c) are sprung on us with little warning and little reassurance.

As I've mentioned, these staff meetings usually bring bad news such as:

We're being sold, we're being sold and it's likely that we'll be closed.

We're being sold and though we won't close, we might lose our jobs.

We won't lose our jobs but we have to change our attitudes and start making money.

We're not making enough money and we need to make more

We are making some money but we're merging with another company and it's possible we might lose our jobs.

So, you can see...these meeting invitations are met with paranoia. What amused me is less than 3 minutes after getting the emailed invitation, I had three simultaneous instant messages from coworkers, all with the same.. "Oh No" in them.

I tried not to be paranoid even though I was informed that I'd missed the fact that our company president had just met with our boss in a very, very quiet meeting with the door closed. Normally, when those two talk, even with the door closed, you can hear the sound of voices even though you can never hear what they're saying. Trust me, my coworker and I have tried to hear and it's impossible. This one was so quiet, my coworker wondered if they were miming.

This, of course, inspired an inappropriate fit of giggles from me as I immediately pictured our president dressed as Marcel Marceau and doing that creepy box thing that mimes do. On the plus side, this made me feel much better. On the down side, since it won't actually happen, no one will understand why the words mime and our president's name will always inspire a loony grinning fit from me unless I explain. And, even when I try to, they will still look at me like I'm crazy.

I digress. To top things off, our boss ended up rescheduling our department meeting until after this staff meeting. He only does that when he 1) either is afraid that we'll ask questions about why we're having a staff meeting or 2) Needs to discuss the meeting with us after it's happened.

Either way, it doesn't bode well. My only hope is that if they're going to schedule a meeting at 8:30 a.m., there better be awkward bagels.

So, on top of my dog feeling poorly and the paranoia that Something Bad is going to happen, I also managed to accidentally delete some rather important information. In my defense, I feel like I was doing my job. My boss and the poor programmer who is responsible for the information don't really agree.

You see, I've recently taken on the responsibility of trying to test our software for vulnerabilities. While I'll never be a hacker because I'm simply not smart enough, I use certain hacker tools to help search for them. Hacking isn't all bad. Bad hacking is called Black Hat hacking. Good hacking is White Hat hacking. The point of White Hat hacking is to try to make sure it's safe against the Black Hats. I'm learning everything as I go along but am having a lot of fun doing it. I've found some nifty tools. One of these tools checks websites for vulnerabilities. Except today, one of my tests apparently deleted some information. I was chastised because I logged in and a real hacker wouldn't have that access. I tried to politely explain to my boss that just because we didn't create accounts for hackers to do bad things to our software, they're usually pretty adept at finding their way in. This is simplified by us by using some not so hard-to-crack encryption for passwords. They couldn't see that I'd helped them out by finding something a hacker could find in less than five minutes. They only saw the damage I'd done.

Fortunately, it's fixable. Unfortunately, I'm in the dog house. I should probably feel bad but I really don't except for the fact that the repairs have to be done by someone who is rather busy and doesn't have time to fix my damage.

Finally, to top it all off, I end up getting scheduled for meetings all afternoon. I dislike meetings. I especially dislike them when I think I'm invited because someone finally realizes I should have been invited all along because I have the same responsibilities as my coworker who is always invited only to discover I'm only invited because she's going to be out of the office on a day when she needs to be there. I wouldn't mind except she really doesn't need to be out of the office. As usual, her and one of her clique have contrived to make it seem like she has to go to this crucial meeting when, really, she has very little to do with the meeting; she just wants to go hang out and support her friend. It would be ok if she didn't have, you know, responsibilities in the office that day, responsibilities that she made sure she made sure she had and I didn't. Yes, I'm bitter. If it wasn't such a regular thing, I wouldn't mind so much.

Ah well, there's no point worrying about it. Life will go on. So will the meetings. They go on. And on. And on. I ended up being rather late home which made it fortunate I'd cancelled the vet appointment.

Sookie seems to be feeling sorry for herself again. I don't know if it's to milk attention or she really does feel under the weather. I think I'll spend the evening keeping an eye on her, just to make sure. Maybe it'll stop me thinking about the meeting tomorrow which, hopefully, will be much ado about nothing.

And, if it is much ado about something...I'll just picture it with mimes.

About Me

I am a writer living in Ohio, by way of Los Angeles, Indiana and the UK. I'm frightfully British though I've lived in the States for over half my life. I work for a software company but would love nothing more than to spend all day writing and using the part of my brain that works best.

Captain Monkeypants is a writer/computer-type-person who lives in Ohio by way of the U.K., Indiana, California and Ohio.

She is a fan of many pop culture-y things particularly Harry Potter, all things Joss Whedon and good TV shows as well as music, soup, cheese and brussel sprouts. She is the author of another blog entirely about TV that can be found athttp://captaintv.blogspot.com/.-----------------------------------In case you're wondering, Captain Monkeypants is not a kinky name, it's mostly because a) I always wanted to be a pirate and thus a Captain so...now I am one and b)I love monkeys and c) because I love Buffy The Vampire Slayer, particularly this bit of dialogue:

Oz: So I'm wondering, do the other cookie animals feel sort of ripped? Like, is the hippo going, 'Hey, man, where are my pants? I have my hippo dignity.' And you know, the monkey's just, [with a French accent] 'I mock you with my monkey pants!' And then there's a big coup in the zoo."

Willow: The monkey is French?

Oz: All monkeys are French. You didn't know that?"

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Comments, questions, discussions and non-spam/non-junk/non-hate can be emailed to her at essex24@gmail.com.